The present article is concerned with the position of the Lithuanian lexical verb on the syntactic tree. As is known, Pollock (1989) postulates the verb raising parameter and examines the differences between a verb raising language like French and a verb non-raising language like English using the position of low adverbs relative to the lexical verb as a criterion. Adverb placement since then has come to be regarded as a powerful diagnostic tool. In addition, by exploring the relation between

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... nner adverbs and stative and eventive verbs, Katz (2003) elaborates on the structure of the syntactic tree immediately above the verb phrase vP/VP and posits the Aspectual Phrase (AspP) as immediately dominating the vP/VP of eventive verbs. The present article examines the verb raising parameter in light of the distributional behaviour of threemanner adverbs: gerai, tvarkingai and visiškai and posits two objectives: to find additional support for the low placement of the Lithuanian lexical verb on the syntactic tree and to examine the area immediately above the verb phrase vP/VP. It is argued Būdo prieveiksmiai gerai, tvarkingai, visiškai ir lietuvių kalbos leksinio veiksmažodžio pozicija sintaksiniame medyje http://dx.Abstract 21 k a l b ų s t u d i j o s / s t u d i e s a b o u t l a n g u a g e s n o . 2 6 / 2 0 1 5 that native Lithuanian prefixes are to be regarded as the lexically manifest head of the aspectual phrase AspP which is positioned above the verb phrase. Keywords: generative syntax, verb raising parameter, Lithuanian, adverb placement, manner adverbs, aspectual phrase. The article is structured as follows. First, the main components of the syntactic tree will be identified. Next, Cinque's classification will be briefly presented and Pollock's analysis regarding the placement of the lexical verb in French and English will beintroduced. This approach will be supplemented with Katz's (2003) findings regarding the (non-)combinability of manner adverbs with stative verbs. Then the distributional behavior of the three adverbs is examined on the basis of the examples collected from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language (CCLL) from two perspectives: the relative adverb/verb order and the type of the predicate used with manner adverbs. The conclusions summarise the results and discuss implications for further analysis.